Butter Toast

Butter Toast is a toast notification system for React apps that puts an emphasis on ease of use, customizability and butter-smooth transitions.

Butter Toast comes with a few built-in styles which you can apply, and you can also use any component for creating the notifications.

Basic usage

The following example code will show a toast whenever the ClickMe button gets clicked. You can read more about the functions and constants used in the docs below.

You can try this example as a live demo here;

1import React, { Component } from 'react';
2import ButterToast, { Cinnamon, POS_BOTTOM, POS_RIGHT } from 'butter-toast';
3
4class App extends Component {
5
6    onClickMe() {
7        ButterToast.raise({
8            content: <Cinnamon.Crisp scheme={Cinnamon.Crisp.SCHEME_BLUE}
9                content={() => <div>You can put basically anything here.</div>}
10                title="ButterToast example"/>
11        });
12    }
13
14    render() {
15        return (
16            <div>
17                This is a simple butter toast example. <button onClick={this.onClickMe.bind(this)}>ClickMe</button>
18                <ButterToast position={{vertical: POS_BOTTOM, horizontal: POS_RIGHT}}/>
19            </div>
20        )
21    }
22}

V3 update

V3 is a near-complete re-write of butter-toast. It brings with it a simpler API and overall more stability (plus, better ie11 support), moreover - it better supports addign features in the future. IT IS INCOMPATIBLE WITH V2. If you are currently a happy V2 user, there is no need to rush for an upgrade - new features will only be added to V3, though.

Terminology:

• Toast: A single notification in the stack.
• Tray: The containing element of a stack of toasts.
• Raise: The action of showing a toast of the screen.
• Dismiss: The action of removing a toast from the screen.
• Cinnamon: Styles library bundled with butter-toast

Content

• Feature list
• How to install
  • Controlling the bundle size
• How to use
  • Creating a tray
    • ButterToast Props
    • Understanding renderInContext
    • Positioning the tray on the screen
  • Emitting a toast
    • Raise params
    • Toast props
    • Custom dismiss and onClick
    • How to access the raise method
  • Dismissing a toast
• Using the built in styles (Cinnamon)
  • Crisp
  • Crunch
  • Slim

Features

• Any component can be a toast. You can use whatever you like.
• Rendering the toast-notifications globally right under body to prevent stacking-context collision.
• Rendering the toast notifications in-context, for positioning relative to parent component.
• Multiple notification tray support, they can be namespaced for separate controls.
• Emitting notifications from every part of your application, not just from the container component.
• Multiple built-in themes.
• Sticky toast notifications.
• Custom on-dismiss and on-click callbacks.
• Custom timeouts for toasts.
• Toasts pause on hover.
• dismissAll at once.

Installation

npm install --save butter-toast

Controlling the bundle size

By default ButterToast comes with a few built-in toast styles. For these styles, it uses Styled Components which adds to the overall bundle size. If you do not intend to use the built-in styles, you can use the lean bundle, which only exposes core stacking behavior, and is only ~4Kb gzipped.

1import ButterToast from 'butter-toast/dist/lean.min.js';

Usage

Creating a notification tray

To use Butter Toast you first need to instantiate a notification tray. You do this by rendering the <ButterToast/> Component. By default it will append your current tray directly under body unless you pass the renderInContext prop read more.

ButterToast props:

Prop	Type	Default	Optional	Description
renderInContext	boolean	true	Y	Determines whether the tray should be renderd relative to body or to its parent component.
className	string		Y	Adds a class to the tray for custom styling
namespace	string		Y	Scopes the tray under a namespace, useful when multiple trays are present on the page.
position	object	null	{ horizontal: 'POS_RIGHT', vertical: 'POS_TOP' }	Y
timeout	number	6000	Y	The default time in ms for toasts in the tray. Can be overridden individually.
spacing	number	10	Y	The distance in pixels between each toast in the tray.
style	Object	undefined	Y	Custom style object for the tray, eases custom positioning

1import React, { Component } from 'react';
2import ButterToast from 'butter-toast';
3
4class MyComponent extends Component {
5    render() {
6        return (
7            <div>
8                <ButterToast/>
9            </div>
10        );
11    }
12}

Understanding renderInContext

By default, a tray gets rendered as a top-level element, appended to the <body> of your html page. The reason this happens is that your toasts appear in an as-high-as-possible stacking context and that nothing shows on top of them. If you need your toasts to be aligned to the content of your react app, or positioned relative to it, use the renderInContext prop that will treat your tray as a regular react component and render it as a descendant of its parent component.

When using renderInContext you will not be able to use ButterToasts positioning, you will need to manually specify the position for the tray using CSS.

To determine the direction in which the toasts stack, you can still use the position.vertical prop. Setting it to POS_TOP will make them stack from the top-down, and using POS_BOTTOM will make them stack from the bottom-up.

Positioning the tray

By default a tray can be aligned to any of the four corners of the screen, and to the top-center, and bottom-center. You can of course use any positioning you would like via css, or a custom style prop to the tray.

If you use renderInContext, no positioning will be applied to your tray - css will need to be used.

ButterToast exposes five constants that let you determine the position of the tray on the scree:

1import ButterToast, { POS_TOP, POS_BOTTOM, POS_LEFT, POS_RIGHT, POS_CENTER } from 'butter-toast';

With these you can specify the vertical and horizontal position of the tray. You need to create an object containing the keys horizontal and vertical to specify where the tray should appear, and pass it down as the position prop:

1import React, { Component } from 'react';
2import ButterToast, { POS_TOP, POS_CENTER } from 'butter-toast';
3
4class MyComponent extends Component {
5    render() {
6
7        const position = {
8            vertical: POS_TOP,
9            horizontal: POS_CENTER
10        };
11
12        return (
13            <div>
14                <ButterToast position={position}/>
15            </div>
16        );
17    }
18}

If you want to manually set the position via css, set position to null and no positioning will apply:

1import React, { Component } from 'react';
2import ButterToast from 'butter-toast';
3
4class MyComponent extends Component {
5    render() {
6        return (
7            <div>
8                <ButterToast position={null}/>
9            </div>
10        );
11    }
12}

Using the style prop

If you deal with a more complex scenario in which you need some more customized styling over existing - such as displaiyng your notifications below your sticky header - you can add a style property to your tray and it will override Butter-Toast's styles with yours.

So for example:

1<ButterToast position={{vertical: POS_TOP,  horizontal: POS_CENTER}} style={{ top: '50px' }}>

Will override POS_TOP's default 10px with 50px.

Raising (emitting) a toast

To emit a toast, you need to use Butter Toast's raise method. Raise accepts the toast and its configuration, and returns its id. The id can later be used to dismiss the toast.

Raise params:

The raise method accepts an object containing the content of your toast, and configuration for it:

Prop	Type	Default	Optional	Description
content	node		N	The actual content being rendered. Could be a react component, a function returning JSX or a string of text.
namespace	string		Y	The named trays to which the toast should apply
timeout	number / Infinity		Y	Overrides the tray's default timeout for the current toast. When Infinity, sets sticky to true.
sticky	boolean	false	Y	Makes the toast ignore its timeout and not dismiss until dismiss gets called on it.
dismiss	function		Y	A custom dismiss function, passing it will require manually calling dismiss. The function will be passed down as a prop to content
onClick	function		Y	onClick handler. The function will be passed down as a prop to content.
pauseOnHover	boolean	true	Y	By default, a toast that's being hovered will pause and not dismiss until released. Setting this to false will override this behavior.

Toast's Content props:

• toastId: the toast's id
• dismiss: either the native, or the custom dismiss handler
• onClick: if passed, the onClick handler.
• • any other prop passed to raise

Using the Custom dismiss and onClick handlers:

Using a custom dismiss handler will override the default dismiss handler passed down to the component. This means that you will need to call the native dismiss handler manually.

Both dismiss and onClick recieve the following params:

• e: the event that triggered the function (i.e.: click)
• toast: The full toast object, containing its component and id
• dismiss: The native dismiss handler that needs to be called when manually dismissing the toast.

Accessing raise:

The raise method is accessible in two ways:

1. A static method accessible via ButterToast: This is extremely useful if you wish notifications to your tray from different locations in your app, or even from outside of React.

If you have multiple trays in the page, using raise this way will emit the toast from all tray, unless you use the tray's namespace.

1import ButterToast from 'butter-toast';
2import `MyToast` from './MyToast';
3import React from 'react';
4
5ButterToast.raise({
6    namespace: 'my-tray',
7    content: MyToast,
8    onClick: ({ toastId, dismiss }) => { console.log('dismissing!'); dismiss(); }
9});
10
11ButterToast.raise({
12    content: ({ toastId, dismiss }) => <div onClick={dismiss}>woohoo!</div>
13});
14
15ButterToast.raise({
16    content: 'this is pretty awesome'
17});

2. An instance method accessible via ref This works exactly like the static method (option 1), only that you do not need to specify the namespapce of the tray as it is pre-linked.

1import React, { Component } from 'react';
2import ButterToast from 'butter-toast';
3import MyToast from './MyToast';
4
5class MyComponent extends Component {
6
7    emitNotification = () => {
8        this.tray.raise({
9            content: MyToast
10        });
11    }
12
13    render() {
14        return (
15            <div>
16                <ButterToast ref={tray => this.tray = tray} position={null}/>
17            </div>
18        );
19    }
20}

Dismissing toasts

Sometimes you would want to dismiss a toast from the outside the toast itself. Similarly raise, Butter Toast exposes the dismiss and dismissAll methods. Just like raise, they can be exposed either as ButterToast static functions (ButterToast.dismiss / ButterToast.dismissAll) or as instance methods (this.tray.dismiss / this.tray.dismissAll).

dismiss accepts the toast's id, and it will dismiss only it, if present in the tray specified.

1import ButterToast, { dismiss } from 'butter-toast';
2
3const toast = ButterToast.raise({ ... });
4ButterToast.dismiss(toast);

dismissAll takes no arguments. If used on a ref, it will dismiss all toasts in the tray, otherwise, it will remove all toasts on the screen.

1import React, { Component } from 'react';
2import ButterToast from 'butter-toast';
3import MyToast from './MyToast';
4
5class MyComponent extends Component {
6
7    dismissAll = () => {
8        this.tray.dismissAll();
9    }
10
11    render() {
12        return (
13            <div>
14                <ButterToast ref={tray => this.tray = tray} position={null}/>
15            </div>
16        );
17    }
18}

Using the built in styles (Sprinkle some cinnamon on top)

For your convenience, Butter toast comes with a few built in Components for quick styling.

You can import them via the cinnamon export.

1import ButterToast, { Cinnamon } from 'butter-toast';
2
3ButterToast.raise({
4    content: <Cinnamon.Crisp title="exciting stuff"
5        content="some words"
6        scheme={Cinnamon.Crisp.SCHEME_RED}/>
7});

The included styles are:

• Crisp
• Crunch
• Slim

Each style comes with its own color schemes, and have a few more props the can further customize them.

All components' content props can be a node. This means that you can pass down a component, a function that returns JSX or a string of text.

The schemes can be accessed as an export of the component itself:

1import ButterToast, { Cinnamon } from 'butter-toast';
2
3Cinnamon.Crisp.SCHEME_BLUE;
4Cinnamon.Crunch.SCHEME_ORANGE;
5Cinnamon.Slim.SCHEME_DARK;

Crisp

Crisp exposes the following color schemes: SCHEME_GREY, SCHEME_RED, SCHEME_ORANGE, SCHEME_PURPLE, SCHEME_GREEN, SCHEME_BLUE.

Crisp props:

Prop	Type	Default	Optional	Description
dismissible	boolean	true	Y	Determines whether the x button should be visible.
title	node	null	Y	A component or a string containing the title of the toast.
content	node	null	Y	A component or a string containing the content of the toast.
icon	node	null	Y	A component or a string containing the icon of the toast.
scheme	string	SCHEME_GREY	Y	The color scheme for the toast.

Crunch

Crunch exposes the following color schemes: SCHEME_GREY, SCHEME_RED, SCHEME_ORANGE, SCHEME_GREEN, SCHEME_BLUE.

Crunch props:

Prop	Type	Default	Optional	Description
dismissible	boolean	true	Y	Determines whether the x button should be visible.
title	node	null	Y	A component or a string containing the title of the toast.
content	node	null	Y	A component or a string containing the content of the toast.
icon	node	null	Y	A component or a string containing the icon of the toast.
scheme	string	SCHEME_GREY	Y	The color scheme for the toast.

Slim

Crunch exposes the following color schemes: SCHEME_DARK, SCHEME_LIGHT.

Crunch props:

Prop	Type	Default	Optional	Description
content	node	null	Y	A component or a string containing the content of the toast.
scheme	string	SCHEME_GREY	Y	The color scheme for the toast.